10 Records of 2015: Carly Rae Jepsen's E·MO·TION

A few months ago, I wrote an angry post about how the album review as a literary genre is incapable of talking about pop albums, and how this was reflected in the reception of Carly Rae Jepsen’s E·MO·TION. In compensating for the lack of a single authorial genius to whom all the tracks can be linked, the critic instead demands a larger-than-life diva whose iconic personality is imprinted on every track, making each album a new chapter in a career of mythic proportions. Jepsen was criticised by a few reviewers for failing to provide such a coherent personality. At the time, I critiqued this criticism while acknowledging that the reviewers were simultaneously positioning Jepsen’s very ‘lack of personality’ as a persona in itself: an Everygirl, relatable if a little ‘boring’.

I now believe that this very lack of a single iconic persona is actually fundamental to the success of this particular album. E·MO·TION is a genuine all-killer-no-filler pop record; every song constitutes its own complete little drama. The album is bursting with those tiny moments that are the reason I love pop songs so much: the bridge, chorus or coda that pushes a song from being a statement or slogan to being an event. Artists of a more iconic stature than Jepsen are able to put out whole songs as gestures. These gestures are made meaningful through the combination of the song-as-sign and the artist’s current iconography or mythology as context. Hence, someone like Rihanna or Madonna can include a song of this-or-that style on her album as a statement-in-itself, just like pastiching a certain aesthetic in a video or stage performance. Even Robyn, who similarly lacks the media presence of certain other pop divas, adopts this approach more than Jepsen. Possibly the closest thing to a stylistic ‘costume’ on E·MO·TION is the unmistakably Hynesian ‘All That’, but the breathtaking re-entry of the bass in the final chorus (with its new stepwise motif) easily prevents this track from functioning as an interchangeable genre cipher.

Words Fail Carly Rae Jepsen

I don’t read conventional music journalism/album reviews so much any more, because they increasingly drive me to despair. More and more, I perceive the insufficiency of writing when it comes to dealing with pop music. Music writing is its own genre, of course, and it can be very powerful, but it is also guilty of producing a whole load of bizarre value categories and interpretative frameworks in its desperate attempt to differentiate, define and assess musical phenomena. Most of all, I really believe that most of the dominant music review ‘narratives’ — i.e., the ways in which a review is given its own ‘literary’ structure — have very little if anything to do with how people actually listen to music.

Two recent and extensively discussed albums — Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION and Ryan Adams’s 1989 — provide perfect examples of this. I have to thank my friend Georgia (@gmllgn) for alerting me to the controversies surrounding both of them; her arguments were the motivation for this post. While both album releases were their own events, reading the resulting critical reactions alongside each other proves fascinating. The Ryan Adams album is a song-for-song cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989, with each song reworked/reinterpreted in Adams’s own style. This provided some (but thankfully not all) reviewers with the opportunity to rehearse their most unreconstructed rockist arguments, about Adams finding the depth and the complexity in Swift’s superficial music, etc. etc. This is a line of argument that is quite unambiguously sexist, in 1) its arbitrary attribution of certain values (depth, complexity) to some sonic characteristics and not others, and 2) its privileging of these (usually ‘masculine’/rock) values over others (usually ‘feminine’/pop). For a round-up of such critical reactions and analysis of their problematic aspects, Anna Leszkiewicz’s article ‘Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the mansplaining of Taylor Swift’, in The New Statesman, says it all.

Adams’s project, like any white indie guy’s appropriation and ‘authentication’ of a female pop artist’s music to make it palatable for his own earnest white male audience, was quite straightforwardly sexist, even before the critics weighed in. The case of E•MO•TION is far more complicated. It is, of course, an incredible album, with brilliant pop song after brilliant pop song, no filler. It is even better than 1989 (the original). And yet it has proven near impossible for some critics to write about. I am mainly talking here about the review by Alexis Petridis in The Guardian (that Georgia discusses, below) and the eerily similar review by Corban Goble in Pitchfork.